PLace-names in mexico-TenochTiTLan • 167a son of Huanitzin, we know nothing of his consecration.
But we do know that like his father, he would expand and
embellish the tecpan, a building that in Guzmán’s imag-
ery was associated with disinterested native governance.
In 1557, soon after being seated, Cecetzin called on com-
moners to bring construction materials for city buildings
(including some in the tianguis), which included 22 large
stones “para portales” like those in the great arched door-
way or portal we see in the tecpan’s outer wall in the Codex
Osuna (figure 5.5). 73 In 1562, he undertook an ambitious
expansion of the building, and the city’s residents were
allowed to go to forests around Cuauhximalpa to cut 200
viguetas (a beam about 20 feet long), 300 beams of 5 brazas
(about 33 feet), and 500 planks of unspecified size for the
building. While the quantity of wood was nowhere close to
the 7,000 beams Cortés ordered for his house in Coyoacan
a few decades earlier, it was still a great amount, at least
4,600 yards (not counting the planks). 74 Given that most
of the architecture in the city was stone and adobe, the
wood would have served for framing and roofing.
While the interior spaces of the tecpan served as meeting
room, archive, and jail, the outside of the building offered
two distinctive features, one of them connected to pre-
Hispanic architecture. The building itself had a balcony,
an elevated display space that allowed the standing ruler
to address his people gathered in the plaza below; such
balconies seem to have been part of pre-Hispanic palaces
as well as the viceregal architecture of the city. It was on
such a balcony, for example, that Moteuczoma was report-
edly assassinated, an event captured in one native picto-
rial. 75 And a diary of life in the city in the 1560s describes
the seated governor addressing a throng from the tecpan
balcony, making himself visible at the same time as he set
himself apart. 76
The enclosed plaza was also found at the tecpan of Tla-
telolco, and daily sweeping would have marked both of
them as sacred spaces. 77 Crossing from the more mundane
space outside into this plaza, indigenous city residents
would muster for parades, and it was here that the mitotes
would unfold, the ritualized dances that brought together
performers, often members of the high indigenous nobility,
dressed in feather costumes to perform. These mitotes, as
we shall see briefly in the next chapter, were key sites for
the enactment of indigenous political power within the
urban sphere.concLusion
When analyzing the etymology of names of tlaxilacalli in
the city, we can see initially that the names “made sense” by
referring to historical events, as well as describing natu-
ral features or qualities within the city. Atlixyocan, which
begins with the word atl, “water,” was appropriately once
a swampy place along the littoral of the island city. But
in considering the written forms of names, we discovered
them to be locales for the expression of collective identity,
be it that of elites or that of the tribute-paying class. As
we moved through the midcentury decades of the city, we
saw some of the historical reasons for the unraveling of
the social contract, with the combination of devastating
epidemic diseases along with more pressure for revenue
being put on an ever-smaller tribute base, those macehual-
tin caught in the middle. In turning to the Codex Osuna,
we saw a new vision of the city and the role of native gov-
ernance within it emerging. In the next chapter, we will
turn to festival life in the city, particularly in the decades of
the 1560s, to see how public processions and spectacle gave
expression to these evolving ideologies of the urban space.